Me and Mr Booker (6 page)

He told me to get some glasses from the bar fridge while he opened the bottle. My hands were shaking so badly that I couldn’t hold the glasses steady so he took them from me, grasping them in one hand while he poured the champagne with the other, then he put everything down and took hold of my arm. He was smiling but in a nervous way, and when I asked him if he wanted me to take my clothes off he laughed.

‘Whatever you feel is appropriate, my sweet,’ he said.

So that’s when he helped me to take my clothes off, and then he took off his suit and pushed me down onto the pink bed, which is when I told him I had never done it before but that I didn’t want him to stop on account of that.

‘Not a chance,’ he said, taking my nipple in his mouth.

‘You don’t mind?’ I said.

He took my hand and pushed it down so that I was holding his erection, which was very hard, but at the same time so soft to touch it was like water.

‘I guess not,’ he said.

Then he said he was sorry if it hurt but he would try to be gentle, and he was, so it didn’t.

Even so there was a lot of blood, which is something I hadn’t expected because nobody had ever told me how sex worked. My mother had tried once but I had told her I already knew everything from the classes they gave us at school, which wasn’t true because the classes were about health and how to prevent pregnancy, but there wasn’t anything in them about sex in motel rooms with married men.

Not that it mattered what I knew or didn’t know because Mr Booker showed me what to do. And I’m a quick learner. He kept asking me if what he was doing was good. Most of the time I nodded and didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to look at Mr Booker and see how much pleasure he was feeling. And also because I wanted to feel the same amount of pleasure myself, since that was why I was here. It wasn’t because I loved Mr Booker. I didn’t, at least not then. The reason I was here was that I wanted him in a way I barely understood. And I knew he wanted me in the same way because he had wanted me in that way from the first moment he saw me. It wasn’t something that he had ever tried to hide.

His body was as smooth and white as a woman’s, and had a sort of loveliness that I don’t think Mr Booker was aware of. His limbs were big and loosely put together like a runner’s, except that he didn’t exercise so his muscles weren’t as taut as they probably were when he was younger. Beside him my body looked brown and as thin as a boy’s, with boyish hips and a straight waist and almost no breasts. He told me I should eat more and fed me the chocolates and strawberries we’d bought on our way to the motel, and after that we finished the champagne and he asked me if I wanted to do it again.

The second time was when I cried out because of the pleasure and the pain that was mixed up with it, and finally just because of the pleasure.

After that we went to motels two or three times a week, whenever Mr Booker could get away from work. I didn’t tell Mr Booker this but the rooms made me think of my father’s place. It was like all the times we got undressed I could feel my father watching us from beside the window where there was always a chair, even though I could see it was empty.

And I felt Mrs Booker watching us too, her mind filled with murderous thoughts. For this reason whenever Mr Booker was helping me out of my clothes I had a sense of danger, which became part of the pleasure I felt, and made it stronger, so strong sometimes that I wanted to cry as soon as he touched me. It was the power he had over me, and at the same time the power I had over him was that I knew how lonely he was. I could see it in the way he watched me moving hard up next to him so that there was no space between us. It was as if he couldn’t believe his luck.

What I did say one time, when Mr Booker was walking around the room naked except for his wristwatch, was that my father thought he looked like a pimp.

Mr Booker picked up the champagne bottle off the dresser and took a swig before he said anything.

‘He’s just jealous,’ he said, taking another swig while pinning me under him so I couldn’t get away. He put his lips to mine and let warm champagne slide from his mouth into mine.

He asked me if my father had a woman in his life and I said that I didn’t think he was interested.

‘He’s interested,’ said Mr Booker. ‘There isn’t a man alive who isn’t interested. What else is there?’

I said I knew what he meant, that all I ever thought about was him, which was true. It was like a sickness, something in the blood that made me faint every time I remembered what he had done to me the previous hour, or day, where he had put his fingers, or his tongue, or Arthur, which was the name he gave his penis. He rolled off me then and watched me while I lit us both a cigarette.

‘It’s as if I had to come twelve thousand miles across the world just to find you,’ he said.

‘Is that a line from a movie?’ I said.

‘If it isn’t it should be,’ he said.

And then he kissed me the way he had kissed me the first time so that I could hardly breathe and when he stopped I could see tears in his eyes. And that’s when I told him I was in love with him and didn’t know what to do about it because he was already married to Mrs Booker and we’d met too late.

‘I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,’ I said.

‘Of course you didn’t,’ he said. ‘You’re too young.’

I took a long drag on my cigarette then and blew the smoke at the sky-blue ceiling.

‘Are you going to hold that against me?’ I said.

‘As the bishop said to the actress,’ he said.

I asked him why he liked that joke so much and he said it was an English thing, and that its subtlety was probably lost on pimply-faced colonial minors like me.

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ I said.

That was how he liked to talk, without really saying anything, as if everything was a game because he had decided to make it one. It meant that he didn’t have to talk about himself. In all the time I knew him I learned almost nothing about him. All I knew was that he was the only child of an office clerk and that his mother liked to knit him sweaters that he hated wearing because they made him itch, and that his parents had been over fifty before they bought their first car. In the only photograph of him I ever saw, he was nine or ten and walking beside his mother somewhere by the sea, except it wasn’t the sea I knew from all our fiery summer holidays. This sea was a cold grey line behind him. He was wearing a woollen jacket with matching shorts and a kind of school cap on his head. It looked like there was a bitter wind blowing because his mother had her coat clutched to her breast and her hand to her felt hat to stop it from flying away.

Ilfracombe, he said it was. He told me you could see Wales from there if it was a clear day, and I thought I had never heard anything so magical, because I was like that then. Anywhere foreign seemed like paradise.

He saw his first movies with his mother—she was obsessed with them. It was what she did, he said, to forget who she was for a couple of hours, and where’s the harm in that? Except that his father objected. It wasn’t good to forget who you were, he said, or where you came from. Mr Booker disagreed. Mr Booker thought it was, for people like his mother, their only hope.

‘She was illegitimate,’ he said. ‘She never knew her father. She thought he was dead until he turned up drunk one day and tried to kick down the door.’

He wanted to know about me, he said, but I told him there was nothing to know, that I had no secrets, that deep down I was superficial.

‘Bollocks,’ he said. ‘You’re a whole continent waiting to be discovered.’ He traced his finger along the line of my ribs and down over my hip, stopping at the small round scar on the outside of my right thigh.

‘How did you get that?’ he said.

I said I didn’t recall exactly but it was while I was learning to ride my brother’s bike, which was too big for me. I said I didn’t even remember the house we lived in then, except that it was pink. I told him that was the house where my mother had caught me on the bed in the sunroom with my hand down my pants.

‘Does this have anything to do with the riding lessons?’ he said.

‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘I had to sit on the bar because I couldn’t reach the seat.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ he said.

‘That’s what my mother said,’ I told him. ‘She slapped me and told me never to do it again. And because I was such an obedient child I never did, except when nobody was around to see me.’

He called me a deviant and I asked what that made him.

‘Craven,’ he said, and then he said he thought there were words that sounded exactly like their meaning and that
craven
was one of them, and
lewd
was another one, and
slime
and
malignant
and
bloated
.

He asked me about my parents and how they met and I told him how my mother was in a bar on a Friday night with her sister Frances when my father bought them both a drink.

‘He was in a pilot’s outfit,’ I said. ‘Apparently my mother couldn’t resist a man in uniform. My father borrowed the pilot’s uniform from a friend while he had his only suit cleaned, but he didn’t tell my mother that. He told her he was flying for British Airways.’

‘The rotter,’ said Mr Booker, tweaking an imaginary moustache.

‘They were married six weeks later.’

He asked me about my childhood and I told him it had been one long car ride.

‘My father was always changing jobs,’ I said. ‘He could never find anything he liked. So we moved from place to place.’ I told him the longest we had ever stayed in one place was two years, and that was only because my mother put her foot down and refused to leave until my brother finished primary school.

He asked me about my brother and I said he was jealous of me because I was the youngest.

‘He thinks I had an easier time than he did,’ I said. ‘But it isn’t true.’

‘Which explains why you’re such a mess,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘What’s your excuse?’

He said he didn’t have one, except his weakness for loose women like myself.

‘So you’re blaming me,’ I said.

‘What else?’ he said.

happy families

Rowena came down for Christmas. She was my mother’s cousin and only ten years older than me. But really nothing like either of us. She’d never believed in marriage or settling down with some guy who would only eventually bore you as much as you bored him. But then all of a sudden she’d decided she wanted to have a baby so she enlisted her gay friend Holden, who she married on the condition that he wouldn’t interfere in the raising of the kid. My mother felt responsible for Rowena, whose own mother had run off and left her when she was fifteen, so Rowena always came to stay with us whenever she felt like some mothering, which was pretty often. My father liked her too, because she didn’t talk back to him, and because she was blonde and pretty. He had a weakness, he said, for pretty blonde girls, even if, like Rowena, they were completely brainless.

I didn’t know her husband very well. I’d only met him once before the wedding. He was from Hong Kong, tall and lanky with glasses and thick hair that he had to keep brushing out of his eyes. His real name was Chinese but his English name was Holden, after the first car he bought when he came to Sydney.

Rowena drove down by herself with the baby. Holden couldn’t come because he was secretly spending Christmas in Bali with his boyfriend.

‘His parents think he’s here with us,’ said Rowena. ‘So I’m just hoping he doesn’t drown or crash his motorbike.’

‘When’s he going to tell them the truth?’ said my mother.

‘Some things are better left unsaid,’ said Rowena, which was the same reason she gave for not telling Victor about Holden because Victor’s views on homosexuality were violent. He wanted them all castrated.

The baby’s name was Amy. She was four months old and happy just to sit up with cushions all around her and wave her hands in the air. It was hard to see any of Rowena in her, except her curly hair and the shape of her mouth. Everything else was Holden’s.

I didn’t tell Rowena what had happened with the Bookers because I wasn’t sure what she’d say. She’d been wild before, but now that she was older and a mother she’d developed some fixed opinions about people. She mostly thought people were too stupid to live, especially the Chinese.

‘With Holden and his friends it’s all about what you own,’ she told me.

When she asked me if I had a boyfriend I said I was saving myself for Mr Wrong.

‘Have your babies early,’ she said, ‘then get your tubes tied. That’s what I’m going to do.’

When I saw the way she was with Amy and the way Amy was with her, all sweet and grinning so that her gums showed with two perfect little teeth at the front, like pearls, I thought maybe she was right. It made me think of the Bookers and how bad Mrs Booker must feel that she didn’t have any babies, and of how I wasn’t helping by going to bed with Mr Booker every Wednesday and Friday afternoon, because if Mrs Booker found out what we were doing she was going to feel a whole lot worse. And so was he. So that was another reason not to tell Rowena or anyone else that me and Mr Booker were lovers, it had to be a secret between the two of us.